Superbad

It's trendy to claim you were a loser in high school. That is, so long as you think you're now really fucking cool. Then, you can talk a lot of shit about how you a) were actually the coolest kid in school but misunderstood, b) pulled yourself up by the hipster bootstrap and turned your geeky ass into a cool person, or c) you were ahead of your time; you haven't changed, but everyone else has caught up to them.

When anyone says "I was such a geek in high school" what they mean is, "Look how fucking awesome I am now." In reality, most kids were just part of the madding crowd. Their classmates didn't spend much time thinking about them. Some of the biggest freaks, the ones known campus-wide for eating earwax, shitting their shorts during PE class or always wearing something with Betty Boop on it, never even though about their position in the pecking order, and still don't. And they still chow-down on crap they find in their ears. Other freaks thought they were really popular. They had no idea that even the other losers made fun of their epileptic seizures or their poetry about falling in love with robots.

The truly popular kids in high school now either sell major appliances and used jet-skis, or they're celebrities. You'll never catch the ones who sell shit talking about how they used to be a geek. No, they spend every fucking night, drunk in shitty bars, telling reminding themselves and the people around them that they were once king of the world, and they plan to re-ascend to their thrones. They cling to it like The well-liked kids who became celebrities are the ones most likely to be full of shit and claim they were once unpopular or losers. Partially, it's bragging about who they are now, but it's also partially them wanting you to think that they had to struggle to become famous; it didn't just fall into their lap.

In most cases, it did fall into their lap. Usually because they look ridiculously attractive. Sure, they worked hard to be recognized, but only because they knew they were so fucking pretty. Mostly because they were always so God damn popular that they never got beat down by rejection and failure. They're celebrities because they wanted to be and they were so popular nobody bothered to tell them they couldn't be. Maybe the reason movies about high school losers always feel so fucking fake is because the people making them don't have a clue what they're talking about.

I'm not going to tell you where I fit into the hierarchy, partially because I'm not sure since I didn't exactly get a diploma from high school. I got mine from the School of Hard Liquor, Underpass at I-76 and Wadsworth campus. Popularity wasn't an issue there. Being able to get old cans of spray paint, cough syrup and model glue was. When I did attend traditional classes, though, kids would piss through the vents of my gym locker and soil my clothes, I almost got expelled for stealing library books, I once ate a bottle of salt on a dare and vomited all the way across campus. Plus, I wanted to have sex with my English teacher, but all she'd give me was a blowjob.

Superbad is pretty fucking funny, and part of the reason is because the kids who are supposed to be outcast geeks really look like them. I expect that from Judd Apatow and his friends. One of the stars and writers of this movie was on Freaks and Geeks, and that show pretty much nailed nerdiness like Studs Jerkel did Candy Bottoms in Balls to the Wall 7, but not so much in Balls to the Wall 8. He was back to quality banging in Balls to the Wall 9.

Sorry for the trip down memory lane, there. That was a great cinematic series, though.

The stars of Superbad, Michael Cera and Jonah Hill, will be graduating from high school soon and both are virgins. We heard this plot about a million times twenty times, right? In the course of of a single day, the best friends scheme to win the hearts of the girls of their dreams and have sex with them. In addition to this, they are facing the future separately because more-slackerish Hill is going to a state school while Cera got into Dartmouth. You know, the name Darmouth has always sounded like something you could get from cunnilingus with a hooker than a university. Apparently its a pretty good and expensive one, though.

By chance, Hill gets teamed with his dream girl (Emma Stone) in home-ec, and Cera runs into his boner-maker (Martha MacIsaac) in the halls and pomises to buy her booze for a big party. He can do that because their even nerdier friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) has scored a fake ID.

What follows plays a hell of a lot like Weird Science, actually. Well, without all the lame fantasy shit about a woman coming to life. But, the comedy of errors about the trial and tribulation of wanting to impress a girl only to discover she actually like the guy just for himself. Followed by nobody actually having sex, but creating a more real bond.

Why the girls like Hill and Cera is a complete fucking mystery to me. These are nice guys, for the most part, but popular high school girls are rarely looking for sweet, naive or innocent. In fact, that's exactly what they are trying to show they've outgrown the first few times they have sex. And, girls, just like guys, give a shit what others think of them, so they aren't likely to want to be seen dating the biggest dork on campus. It isn't until much later that your layers of self esteem have been peeled away like onion skins by all the hateful comments, sneering, ridicule and shame that life dishes out. I'd say most people don't give up until they are 25 or so, and then start walking around outside in their underwear, eating Bugles for breakfast and shooting snot rockets into the neighbors' decorative crockery.

What distinguishes Superbad from every other coming-of-age teen comedy are two things: First, Cera and Hill really look like high school nerds. Neither looks like a movie star whose hair they pomaded and then stuck on some thick glasses to replicate a nerd. They have the clothes, body shapes and style of losers, Basically, they look like they went to the mall with their moms, said "Yeah, whatever" to the shit was pulled off the clearance rack, and bolted for the arcade to play "Dragon's Lair". Cera is the shyer and less aggressive of the two. He seems to have a more realistic sense of his place in the high school caste system. Hill is more aggressive and talks a bigger game. He thinks that the difference between he and the popular kids is just how hard they try and how loud they are.

Second, and more important, is that Superbad has a genuine sweetness. The ending, with its predictable boy-gets-girl shit still takes a moment to let Cera and Hill acknowledge that it's time to grow up. They can no longer cling to each other like a security blanket, pretending that bragging about all the chicks they're going to fuck is equal to actually having sex. Now it's time to actually talk to a girl in real life instead of in their one-sided fantasy world.

Superbad is a pretty funny fucking movie. It stumbles over the same problems as other teen sex comedies, but for the most part it works. And it's nice to see geeks make a movie that's not latently gay and about a man in tights. Three Fingers.